Beside me, Sophie elbowed me in the ribs. “Hey, you told Aidan that we call him that?”
My cheeks burned guiltily. “What can I say? Occasionally I slip up.”
“To Kate,” Cece said, sounding solemn now.
“And Jack,” Sophie added.
“And . . . I think that’s everyone, right?” Cece raised her bottle high in the air. “Cheers!”
“Cheers!” we echoed in unison, clinking our bottles with gusto.
I glanced around the room at my friends as they scrambled for seats, thinking that I was perhaps the luckiest person alive. I took a mental picture of the moment, a still life of friendship captured on the canvas of my mind.
Tyler sat at the head of the table and reached for a plate. “Now rub-a-dub-dub, pass me some grub!”
Aidan shot him a deadly glare. “Violet, would you mind telling your little friend that he’s sitting in my seat?”
At once, everyone turned to stare at him. We seemed to be holding our collective breaths, waiting.
And then Aidan smiled. “Come now, you didn’t think I was serious, did you?” he asked with a laugh. “My seat is right here beside you, of course.”
Smiling broadly, I leaned over and kissed him on the cheek.
“What time is it?” I asked Aidan while I perched on the edge of the bed, admiring the room. “My body is so confused.” All this back-and-forth to Europe was wreaking havoc on my sleeping schedule.
“It’s about two in the morning, local time. Are you tired?”
I shook my head. “Not really. So . . . this was really your room?”
“It was.” He stood at the foot of the bed, looking around. “They’ve changed it around some, of course. That portrait wasn’t there, for one.” He indicated a painting above the fireplace. “The bed, though . . . it’s the same. I assume the duvet is a reproduction, but it’s an exact one.”
The bed. This was the bed, I realized. The one from my vision—antique mahogany with four spindly posts. I’d seen it on the website, too—with the blue damask duvet trimmed in gold that I was sitting on now.
I tried to remember the vision, to remember what had seemed so ominous about it, but my memories were mostly hazy. It had been a long time since I’d replayed it. All I remembered was that Aidan and I were in the bed and that my hair was short. Like it was now. I hadn’t even considered that when I’d gotten it cut. It wasn’t like I’d had a choice, not with a big chunk of it burned off, anyway.
What, exactly, was going to happen if I got in this bed with Aidan? “Maybe we should sleep somewhere else,” I said tentatively.
Aidan gave me a puzzled look. “I thought for sure you’d want to stay here. We could move you to the master suite, if you’d like. You can take my mother’s bed.”
Out of respect, no one had claimed his mother’s rooms. His sisters’ suites had been fair game, though. They were among the prettiest, with elaborate dressing tables and huge windows that opened out to the gardens below. Sophie and Marissa had immediately laid claim to those, leaving Cece to battle it out over the remaining rooms with Tyler, Joshua, and Max. Of course, the choices seemed endless—Brompton Park boasted an entire wing of guest suites.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Wouldn’t that be a little weird for you, me sleeping in your mother’s bed?”
“Not particularly,” he answered with a shrug. “Anyway, it’s up to you.”
I gave the bed a sidelong stare, still unsure.
“Are you worried that I’ve . . . in this bed?” A faint flush stained his cheeks. “Never, not in this room, if that’s what’s on your mind, Violet.”
“I wasn’t thinking that. Of course, now I’m curious. If not here, then where?”
He leaned against the bedpost, watching me curiously. “Are you asking me where I lost my virginity?”
I closed my eyes, trying to banish the images. “Never mind. I don’t want to know.”
“Because back in those days, you—”
“Stop! Don’t tell me. Just . . . forget that I said anything about it, okay? We’re fine here. I don’t want to have to move all my stuff.”
“You know what I just remembered?” he said abruptly, pushing off the bed and walking over to the adjoining dressing room. “I wonder if it’s still here.”
I rose, following him. “If what’s still where?”
He pushed the dressing table away from the wall and knelt down behind it.
“What are you looking for?”
“Can you hand me a pen or something? From the desk?”
“Sure,” I said, walking back to the bedroom. But when I saw the pen—more like a quill, really—there on the desk, well . . . I wasn’t going to give him that one. Instead, I went over to my purse and dug around, finding an old ballpoint on the bottom that probably didn’t even work. “Here,” I said, hurrying back and handing it to him.
I bent over him, watching in amazement as he pried loose a floorboard, then two more. When he’d exposed a hole in the floor about ten inches long by four inches wide, he reached inside and retrieved a rectangular wooden box.
“It’s still here,” he said, rising. “I can’t bloody well believe it.”
“Have you noticed that you slipped into full Viscount Brompton speech the moment we got here?” I asked. “I mean, I love your accent and all, but it’s kind of freaking me out.”
He ignored me, carefully lifting the lid and peering inside.
“Are you going to tell me what’s inside your little box?” I prodded.
He looked up at me and smiled. “My secrets.”
“Your secrets? Um, okay.”
He took out a folded piece of paper, yellowed with age. “It’s poetry, mostly, and dreadful, at that—chock-full of adolescent rage. I must have been fourteen, fifteen or so.”
“Oh my God! You wrote poetry? You’re going to let me read it, right?” I held out my hand. “C’mon, I’ll be really careful.”
“I’ve never shown them to anyone before. Not in all these years—more than a century.”
“Please?” I wheedled, dying of curiosity now. “Just one?”
“You’ve been warned,” he said after a pause. “It’s painfully bad.”
Gingerly, I took the fragile page from him. The first thing I noticed was that his handwriting was completely different—unrecognizable, really. Maybe it was his youth; maybe it was the old-fashioned pen he’d used, one that had to be dipped in ink. Whatever it was, it threw me for a loop. But not as much as the words I managed to decipher did.
We move as one
Together in union
Your breath cools my soul
Tenderness once forgotten
Leads to my explosive rebirth
Helpless, powerless
I give my heart to you
It lies crushed
Beneath the weight of your hatred
That was all I could make out, but it was enough for me to realize that it was about a girl.
“Wow,” I said at last. “That’s really beautiful. Here, let me see another one.”
One by one, he unfolded the slips of yellowed vellum. I couldn’t make out most of it, just a few lines here and there. Most were angry, I realized. Really angry.
“Whoever she was, I’d say it didn’t go very well,” I muttered.
He shook his head. “No, it didn’t. I was very young.”
“I just can’t believe you wrote these,” I said, carefully folding the last slip and handing it back to him. “You seem like a totally different person than you are now.”
“I was spoiled, careless. I got angry if I didn’t get exactly what I wanted.”